Claiming the Spare Twin novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The Pull

Dorran's POV

Keegan drove my grandmother back to the lodge, and I took Tilda to the hunting cabin on the river bluff.

It stood on my side of the river, in sight of the ford.

I wanted her where I could hear every sound outside.

She said almost nothing on the drive.

She sat with her mother's letter folded in her fist and watched the rain turn to a thin mist on the glass.

I lit the stove and set out bread and cheese.

She ate none of it.

"I'm going to look at the river," she said.

"I'll come."

"Stay. I'll be one minute."

I let her go.

That was my mistake, and I knew it a quarter hour later, when I realized I could no longer hear her feet.

I found her standing in the shallows below the bluff, with the water over her ankles and her boots on the bank.

The moon had come out behind the cloud.

Tilda stood with her face turned up to it, perfectly still.

"Tilda."

Nothing.

I went down the bank and the cold bit through my boots, and I saw her hands.

The nails were black and curved.

"Tilda." I said it louder. "Look at me."

She turned her head, and her eyes were gold from rim to rim.

There was no one behind them that I knew.

"He is on the other bank," she said, in a voice that was hers and was not. "I can smell him. He is eating, and he is warm, and he is alive."

"I know."

"I can cross in four strides."

"I know that too."

She took a step toward the far bank.

If she crossed that river and killed him, she would be a murderer before she was an alpha.

Cold Creek would never kneel to her.

And I understood, watching her, what it was to be bound to something that old.

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